“The sensation is that these choices of mine are not only mine but that others have them too. I really don’t feel exclusive… My ambition instead, perhaps because of my peasant-worker background, is to look at the world with others, not as an aristocratic intellectual.” – Ermanno Olmi

“Lang is a mix of artist and pulp storyteller, pessimist and entertainer. As much as any other film director he found how to fuse high and low culture in the new medium of the cinema.” – The Permanent Magic of Fritz Lang, bfi.org.uk

“Suddenly the ideologues are telling you this is decadent, these are four apes (the Beatles) escaping from the jungle. I thought I’m not such an idiot that I love this music, and suddenly these political ideologues were strangers.” – Miloš Forman

“It takes a longer view of history which was an extraordinarily brave thing for someone to do in 1943, at a time when history seemed to have disintegrated into its most helpless, impossible and unforgivable state.” – Stephen Fry

“Polanski’s work might be seen as an attempt to map out the precise relationship between the contemporary world’s instability and tendency to violence and the individual’s increasing inability to overcome his isolation…” – J. P. Telotte, FilmReference.com